ORBzine - Horror 2008 - Movie Reviews
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
Constantine (2005)
This is adapted from the
Garth Ennis
comic Hellblazer.
Freelance exorcist John Constantine (Keanu Reeves - The Matrix ) and his sidekick Shia Leboeuf ( Transformers ) team up with Police detective Rachel Weiss to investigate the mysterious death of her sister.
Satan (Peter Stormare - Armageddon ) is engaged in a perpetual war against the forces of Good, including the Archangel Gabriel ( Tilda Swinton ). The plot device they are fighting over is the spear of destiny, which the Nazis hid in Mexico and is now on its way to Los Angeles.
Unusually for DC films, this one has an after-credits scene. Hang around, it is worth the wait.
The Dark (2005)
Maria Bello
takes her young daughter to spend a few weeks with ex-husband Sean Bean (
Goldeneye
). Unfortunately, Bean lives on a remote farm in Wales, on a clifftop.
Then the daughter goes missing ...
Local crofter Maurice Roeves ( Dr Who: Caves of Androzani ), despite being a Scotsman in Wales, manages to provide exposition. It seems that there is an evil presence, reminiscent of Pet Semetary and Ringu . The movie is based on a novel entitled Sheep!, but this seems a reference to sheep-like followers of Cults (as in The Wicker man ). That said, there are some scenes reminiscent of Black Sheep !
Frailty (2001)
FBI Agent Powers Booth (
Agents of Shield
) is investigating a serial killer who calls himself God's Hand.
Redneck Matthew McConaghy tells him a story about his childhood (when he
looked like Gary Giggles from
Spy Kids 2 & 3
). His father (Bill Paxton -
Terminator, Aliens
) claimed to have visions from JeHoVaH, telling him to kidnap and kill people.
Naturally, Paxton and his youngest son do just that.
This is a wonderful directorial debut from Paxton. The tension is notched up wonderfully, and the cast acquit themselves wonderfully. The final twist - well, it is a real kick in the teeth.
In Dreams (1999)
Annette Benning
stars in this copy of
The Eyes of Laura Mars
, directed by
Neil Jordan
. It is chilling and noir, but with a poor ending.
Stephen Rea, Aiden Quinn and Robert Downey junior lend support.
Mirrors (2008)
This was Directed by Frenchman
Alexandre Aja
and filmed in Europe (sitting in for an American city).
It is yet another remake of an Asian horror film.
Kiefer Sutherland is a paranoid, angsty, gun-toting ex-cop. Quite reminiscent of his character in 24, in fact. He gets a job as security guard in a derelict Department store.
The eeevil entity can jump from one mirror to another, and is not limited to the mirrors in the Department Store. In fact, it can manifest itself through any reflective surface! Kiefer must protect his sister ( Amy Smart ), his wife and kids from the monster.
Dead Zone (1983)
This is a
David Cronenberg
adaptation of a book written by
Stephen King
. It is a lot less visceral than the director's usual work, but it is still competently directed.
John Smith (Christopher Walken - View To A Kill ) is in a car crash. He wakes up from a coma five years later, and thanks to Dr Herbert Lom ( Revenge of the Pink Panther ) he discovers that he has psychic powers. Any time he touches a person he can see terrible events that have or will befall them.
Smith's life becomes a bit episodic from there on. For example, Sheriff Tom Skerrit ( Alien ) is hunting a serial killer. Nine women have been killed over the previous three years, and the FBI and State Troopers cannot seem to help.
Anthony Zerbe ( Licence to Kill ) hires Smith to tutor his young son.
Greg Stilson (Martin Sheen - A.L.F. ) is running for election as a Third Party candidate. Smith forsees that Stilson will get elected ... but that this is a very bad thing! Can Smith change the future?
Presumably the makers of The West Wing never saw this!
Boogeyman Franchise
Boogeyman (2005)
A young man is haunted by memories of his childhood, when he was menaced by a supernatural creature.
However, events send him back to his childhood home where he must finally confront the monster.
Yes, it is a generic storyline also used in films like
Darkness Falls
. However, the first two acts of the film are very suspenseful indeed ...
The climax of the film is a real let-down. All the suspense built up throughout the first two acts is blown away by the revelation that the monster is dodgy low-budget CGI SPFX!
Boogeyman 2 (2007)
A young girl sees her parents slaughtered by a knife-wielding maniac.
There is nothing supernatural about this,
but she grows up with an intense phobia of the Boogeyman.
There is nothing to indicate this is linked to the monster of the first film,
which had the supernatural ability to teleport from closet to closet,
and never needed a knife in order to kill a victim.
Ten years later the girl ( Danielle Sauvre ) is still suffering from nightmares. She visits a shrink ( Renee O'Connor ), and has herself committed to a secure mental health institution. This is the same place her brother spent a lot of time in, and he has been declared cured, so she thinks it will do the same for her.
The hospital administrator, Dr Mitchell Ryan (Tobin Bell - Saw ), oversees the group sessions. Because he is stale, male and pale he is not as good a shrink as Gabrielle from Xena: Warrior Princess .
The inmates start to die in mysterious circumstances, according to their worst fear come to life. If this is the same killer that slaughtered the parents at the start, does this mean their worst fear was a psycho with a knife? That is surely more of a generic fear, not a specific phobia. And why does the Boogeyman only target the clinic when the sister is there, and not during the brother's long-term stay? Actually, these apparent plot holes are tied up in the climax.
This is basically a bog-standard stalk-and-slash. Dr Ryan is a suspect, because he might be killing off his own patients as an experiment. However, the whodunnit element is sidelined and it is treated as a supernatural monster movie.
Other problems with the film-making include the use of a body-double in the nude scenes. It is not the Final Girl who is seen topless, just a supporting character, so we must wonder why the film-makers did not either cast a supporting actress who was willing to do her own nudity or choose a body double who had the same hairstyle as the actress she was doubling.
Boogeyman 3 (2008)
This is the second sequel to an original that was well-directed and taut,
but let down by terrible CGI in the climactic third act.
This is the most successful attempt at a creating
a original American franchise of supernatural suspense films,
rather than just adapting Asian films for the American market
The story starts with the Boogeyman stalking a college girl. One of them is daughter of a famous shrink recently killed at his Asylum. Presumably this is a link to the previous film in the series.
The college kids are the usual predictable bunch of stereotypes, starting with the smart brunette girl (usually the Last Girl) and her hunky but half-witted BF. The group is rounded out by the slutty blonde friend, Token Black Guy and Foreign Exchange Student (an Australian this time).
The premise seems to be that the people most susceptible to the Boogeyman are people who believe in him. Our heroine then goes around trying to convince everyone that she is right, and the Boogeyman is really after her - making THEM susceptible to him as well! Nice work, sweetheart!
The Boogeyman stalks the heroine, bumping off her friends in exotic ways and then making it look like accidents. He can also appear in dreams and nightmares - like a cut-price Freddy Kreuger, without the style or one-liners. The CGI is not as bad as in the original (which is not saying much), but that is no reason to over-use it. Suspense works when you DO NOT show the monster. This is just predictable!
Jayne Wisener gets a tiny walk-on part as a college girl named Amy. Her scene at the end is the only part worth watching.
Death Note Franchise
Death Note (2006)
The Horror movie that took Japan by storm, they say.
In fact, like most Asian J-Horror films this is a supernatural suspense thriller,
not a simplistic slasher like Western horror films have become.
Criminals start to drop dead of heart attacks. The police, naturally, are baffled. They blame a serial killer who is codenamed Kira.
The killer is a law student who discovered that sometimes people accused of crimes get away with it. You know, due to lack of evidence, unreliable witnesses, the pesky fact of their innocence ... And when he gets hold of a magic book that kills anyone whose name is written in it, the student does not hesitate to kill anyone he takes a dislike to.
The Japanese Police call in the greatest detective in the world, a reclusive figure known as L. He begins, step by step, to unmask Kira. How far will Kira go to protect himself?
Death Note 2: The Last Name (2006)
A copycat killer, Kira 2, uses a TV broadcast to order everyone to do as Kira says.
Many young people obey instantly - this is Japan, after all,
where morality is over-simplified.
Western concepts like Justice is only the will of the strong
are overridden by Might Makes Right.
Power Corrupts is ignored in favour of My boss, right or wrong.
Police officers who try to enforce the law are instantly killed by the new Kira!
L and the Special Unit begin to close in on the new killer. But things get more complicated than ever. The Gods of Death (that is how the subtitles translate it, though from the context Spirit or Demon might be better) have additional supernatural powers, which they use at the whim of the book-owners.
This is a great sequel - developments were foreshadowed in the first film, and everything is brought to a natural conclusion in this one.
Final Destination Franchise
Final Destination 2 (2003)
This is set a year after the events of the first movie.
Those events have gained a certain notoriety,
since it is well-documented enough to be more than just an urban myth.
The opening credits are conducted to a voice-over
of a conspiracy theorist being interviewed on a radio show,
and pretty accurately summarises the concept behind the series.
A young woman ( AJ Cook ) goes for a drive with her best friends Shaina ( Sarah Carter ) and Frankie (Shaun Sipos - Krypton (2018) ). While on the freeway, with other road-users including a yuppie woman ( Keegan Connor Tracy ) and a traffic cop (Michael Landes - Special unit 2 ), they are involved in a multiple pile-up. There are lots of car crashes - some of them realistically bone-crushing, and others that result in pyrotechnical fireball explosions which are completely OTT.
It turns out that the pile-up was a vision of the future. As with the first film, the survivors will die one at a time in the order that they were meant to die in the pile-up. The deaths are bigger and more spectacular than the original, which means this movie appears to have a bigger budget. Perhaps they saved a lot of money by filming this in Vancouver, since most of the cast seem to be Canadians.
While the original relied on suspense, this focuses more on spectacle. For example, the year this was made was a time when lateral bisection by wires was the go-to gory death scene for big movies. Naturally, this movie has just such a scene. However, this is not entirely spectacle-based. The first death has a series of set-ups - any one of which could pay off - yet the actual kill scene is well foreshadowed and does not feel like a cheat.
The Final Girl and the Cop go looking for help. One of the survivors of the original film makes an appearance. Clear Rivers ( Ali Larter ) has voluntarily admitted herself to a secure mental hospital. The doctor who oversees the security system is female, so at least this movie passes the Bechdel test. Rivers leads the others to the Undertaker (Tony Todd - Candyman (1991) ).
The plan to defeat Death is to help one of the female survivors, a heavily pregnant woman, to give birth. She is escorted to the maternity ward by Chief Tyrol ( Battlestar Galactica (2003) ). Will the plan work?
[August 2000 ]
[February 2006 ]
[Final Destination Franchise
The Final Destination 3-D (2008) AKA Final Destination 4
Yes, there was a trilogy but now the triangle has been squared,
now we have yet another franchise that will not die.
Why should the producers care?
After all, the
Saw
series is far inferior to this one,
and yet is still making vast sums of money for its investors.
To be fair, this one actually has a new gimmick. It is part of the new wave of 3-D revival films. Yes, probably thanks in part to Spy-Kids 3-D by Robert Rodriguez we now have a rash of these 1980s-style 3-d films.
The previous films had signature kills. The second one was slicing wires. The third was crushing brain injuries. This time, predictably because it is 3-D, is things flying at the camera, and through the victim.
The victims are a bunch of students who attend a Nascar race when there's a multiple pile-up and an entire stand full of audience people is slaughtered in a fiery inferno. Krista Allen is a hot soccer-mom, certainly cast against type but it is nice to see her in a different type of role. Token Black Guy Mykelita Williamson ( Species 2 ) is the security guard.
[August 2000 ]
[February 2006 ]
[Final Destination Franchise ]
Final Destination 5 (2011)
Although the previous film in the series was a 3-D film,
and intended to be the last in the series,
this film actually trumps it on both counts.
The title sequences has 3-D portrayals of some of
the most memorable death sequences in the series,
which gives the audience some idea of what to expect.
Although the movies is setting itself up for comparison,
it also manages to tie up the series to a satisfying conclusion.
The main characters are a bunch of tweenagers played by a group of American unknowns rather than the usual group of small-time Canadians. They all work for the same company, and are on a bus to their employer's job-related event when the bridge they are on collapses. This allows for a lot of falling-towards-camera sequences of the type favoured by 3-D movies.
The survivors begin to die off, one at a time, in a series of unlikely accidents. Thanks to some exposition by the local coroner (Tony Todd - Candyman ), they work out the rules of Death. An investigator (Courtney B Vance - Highlander: The Series ) realises that something about the string of mysterious deaths just does not make sense.
The characters do not use cell-phones or mention the Internet, which makes this unusual for a 2011 film. The athletics venue has banners about an event in 1994, which would also be out of date if this were set in 2011. All is tied up in the end ...
[August 2000 ]
[February 2006 ]
[Final Destination Franchise ]
Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025)
[August 2000 ]
[February 2006 ]
[Final Destination Franchise ]
Hollow Man Franchise
Hollow Man 2 (2006)
This is a straight-to-Video sequel.
Seattle Police Detective Peter Facinelli (
Supernova
) is assigned to guard scientist
Laura Regan
from invisible Special Forces soldier Michael Griffin (Christian Slater -
Interview With The Vampire
).
Apparently when you are invisible, radiation damages your cells. Griffin wants a secret formula known as the buffer - a bit like the Counteragent in Invisible Man (1999)
Hostel Franchise
Hostel (2005)
A couple of young American men, Jay Hernandez (
Suicide Squad (2016)
) and his buddy, are backpacking their way across Europe
when they get invited to stay at a hostel in a remote village in central Europe.
Unfortunately the place is run by the Elite Hunting Club -
a group of rich thrill-seekers who torture and kill for sport.
This effort, written and directed by Eli Roth , and we can thank it for kick-starting the Torture Porn sub-genre of Horror movie. This also marks Roth's official coming out as the protege of Quentin Tarantino .
The highlight of the film is a cameo by the always-impressive Rick Hoffman ( Blood Work ).
Hostel 2 (2007)
Taking up where the first film left off,
the Hostel is still in business - torturing and murdering backpackers.
Yes, it is obviously yet more torture-porn crap. But this is slightly different from the first one. To start with, we get to meet a couple of first-time clients. Richard Burgi ( Starship Troopers 2 ) and his buddy, Roger Bart (Revenge), are American businessmen out to try something new. And the Elite Hunting Club offers them the next big thing.
Another change is, this time the victims are GIRLS. Heather Matarazzo is a familiar face, while Lauren German is a new face who went on to bigger and better things. Anyway, this is predictable damsel-in-distress stuff - but the twist with the Last Girl is almost impressive.
ALMOST.
Everything in it is telegraphed in advance, there is nothing too original. Some of the gore, perhaps - but then, that is what this genre is about. It is obvious who is going to die, but the manner of their deaths is where the creativity went.
Hostel Part III (2011)
Thomas Kretschmann (
Stendahl Syndrome
) runs the Las Vegas branch of the Elite Hunting Club.
Unfortunately he has not learned what the home base learned
- that top security is vital for the smooth running of the operation.
However, his branch - set in a disused Hotel/casino - has the most lax security so far.
John Hensley ( Witchblade ) co-stars.
Jeepers Creepers Franchise
Jeepers Creepers 2 (2003)
This is set the same week as the original.
A Farmer (Ray Wise -
Robocop, Swamp Thing
) loses his son to the Creeper.
Naturally, he sets out for some payback.
The Creeper's new target is a bus-load of stereotypical High School Jocks and cheerleaders driving home from the Big Game. One of the cheerleaders ( Nicki Aycox ) starts having psychic flashes of the previous victims ...
While this may lack the originality of the original, being as it is a sequel, this is actually in many ways a better film. The mid-point twist of the first film is a genre shift that turns it from crime/slasher thriller to supernatural monster movie. In contrast, this is a simple supernatural horror from the outset. The flying monster does not mess about in a big truck for no reason. Instead it just flies about and does monsterous things.
If there is one flaw in the film it is the choice of victims. This is what John Carpenter would have referred to as a Dead Teenager Movie. It would have been improved if the bus had been full of grown men, like in The Thing - Carpenter's great success after his own slasher masterpiece, Halloween . What if the convicts from HBO prison drama Oz were hunted by the Creeper? Think of it as Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead ... only good. As it is, Ahab the farmer has to be the token grown-up in the film.
Jeepers Creepers 3 (2017)
This is set directly after the original and before the sequel.
The Farmer (Ray Wise -
Robocop, Swamp Thing
) does not appear in this film,
as this is set before his first chronological appearance.
There is a reference to the events of the third film at the end,
and there is a replacement figure in this film -
a redneck who has mounted a 20mm gatling cannon on the back of his pickup truck.
After the events of the first movie, the Creeper abandoned its van and flew off. This left a bunch of unanswered questions. Why would a flying demon need a van? Well, it turns out the Creeper has a preference for fresh food. The van is not so much a slaughterhouse on wheels as it is a larder. Somehow, the Creeper managed to rig it with amazing boobytraps and enough armour-plating to bounce a 20mm round.
This brings us to the Creeper itself. It was originally a run-of-the-mill cannibalistic serial-killer, like in Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3 . But when it became a flying demon with a halloween mask for its face, the story took a turn for the worse. The original Creeper might have needed the van, and might have had the technical know-how necessary to build it. A flying demon that only wakes for three weeks every couple of decades has not got the time to master the necessary skillset. The Creeper's only weakness is its apparent unwillingness to use guns, although since it uses projectile weapons like spears and shurikens (carved from the bones of its victims) this does not slow it down.
An old woman ( Meg Foster ) is visited by the ghost of her son, who was apparently eaten and absorbed by the Creeper. The ghost warns that the Creeper will return to recover its severed limb. This limb, a hand that it replaced two decades earlier, has a couple of magical powers of its own. Firstly, it can walk around like the hand in The Addams Family (1991) . Secondly, any human who makes skin-on-skin contact with it will be telepathically endowed with the knowledge of where it came from. Yes, some humans actually discover the origins of the Creeper. Unfortunately this is not shared with the audience. Worse, they do to bother to share it with other humans - either verbally or in writing.
The ending reveals that the narrator is Gina Philips , and it foreshadows the next climactic battle. Yes, the Creeper is still due to come back twenty-three years after the events of the second film. In other words, this film is just setup for the film that the audience wanted to see.
Nightmare on Elm Street Franchise
Nightmare on Elm Street 5: Dream Pool (1989)
Alison, the Last Girl of the previous films, is now pregnant.
Freddy comes back again -
using her unborn child's dreams, and bumping off her friends.
But Freddy's mother appears in dreams too, trying to protect her son's victims.
Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)
Genre star
Katie Cassidy
was a pretty blonde in
Supernatural
, a gorgeous brunette in Harpers Island and is now back to average-looking Blonde.
Like the rest of the cast she is ten years too old to convincingly play a teenager,
but that is not necessarily the film's biggest problem.
She and her BF (John from
Sarah Connor Chronicles
), like the other teenagers in Springfield,
are having nightmares about the gravely Rorschach-like voice of Jackie Earl Haley (
Watchmen
). School headmaster Clancy Brown (
Highlander
) is hiding a few secrets.
We all know what the story is, but this version manages a few twists.
Twilight Franchise
Twilight (2008)
Director
Catherine Hardwick
is best known for teen drama Thirteen.
The core of this story is teen angst,
and the director gets great performances out of her young leads.
The heroine is Bella ( Kirsten Stewart ), a teenage girl who goes to live with her divorced dad (Billy Burke - Revolution ), who is the sheriff of a small town in Washington State, Northwest USA. She falls for local boy Edward (Robert Pattinson - Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire ), but there is something unusual about him ...
Edward lives with his foster-family, led by an albino doctor (Peter Facinelli - Supernova, Hollow Man 2 ). One of the foster-sisters is Nikki Reed , the director's discovery from Thirteen.
Finally, by the end of the Second Act the teenage drama is set aside and the thriller subplot emerges. A trio of ravenous vamps (including Rachel Lefevre , a girl who looks like a young Nancy Allen ) are passing through the area, eating humans along the way. One of them decides that Edward's play-thing would make a nice meal ...
Twilight: New Moon (2009)
The Cullen Clan leave town for the next few decades. Bella (
Kirsten Stewart
) hangs out with her backup, Jacob the Native American.
It turns out that Jacob and the other teenage boys of his gang are ... Werewolves!
Just as well, because the evil redhead vamp from the first film is still hanging around.
The ending, somewhat tagged on, involves the Volturi - an aristocratic clan of Vampire Elders led by Michael Sheen (the Werewolf leader in Underworld ) and Christopher Heyderdal ( Sanctuary ). They enforce the laws of the vampire community, to ensure that they do not come to the attention of human Inquisitors.
Twilight: Eclipse (2010)
Nothing has actually changed from the start of the previous film. Bella (
Kristen Stewart
) is still being courted by Edward the vamp AND Jacob the werewolf.
Victoria (who now looks like
Bryce Dallas Howard
) survived the first movie and is still running loose in the woods.
The werewolves care more about scaring off the Cullen Clan (the friendly vamps)
than about actually hunting the bitch.
Someone is building an army of new vamps by killing lots of people in Seattle. The Volturi, who are supposed to keep vamps from high-profile acts, know all about it but do not care enough to intervene. This all builds up to a violent climax.
This is episode three of a four-book series. It ends one dragged-out story arc, but there is yet more to come. It is padded out even more than Peter Jackson 's adaptation of The Hobbit . Yes, like the Harry Potter series the final book has to be split in two.
Twilight: Breaking Dawn (2011)
Bella and Edward finally get married.
Everyone is invited, even Irina (
Maggie Grace
), a strawberry blonde she-vamp
whose lover was eaten by werewolves a couple of movies ago.
Jacob is the only one not happy about Team Edward winning,
but the rest of the wolf tribe respect Bella's choice
and prevent Jacob from doing anything stupid.
Bella and Edward head off for their honeymoon. They have their own private island near Rio. Why they want somewhere near the equator is not explained. They would get far more hours of winter darkness in Tasmania or New Zealand.
This series has equated sex with death, specifically by the vampiric bite. And once the couple consumate their honeymoon, the implications of violence are there. The bed is broken, Bella ends up bruised and battered ... and then, somehow, she gets pregnant!
Bella gets sequestered in the Cullen home, back in Washington State. Her vampiric unborn child is slowly draining the life out of her. Carlisle Cullen (Peter Facinelli - Supernova, Hollow Man 2 ) is a Doctor, but he displays a complete lack of both medical knowledge and scientific curiosity. It takes weeks for anyone to think of replacing her depleted blood supply!
Jacob is shocked and horrified at the idea of a vamp foetus inside his friend. His pack-mates, formerly supportive of Bella, now decide that she has breached the treaty between them and the Vamps. They decide to kill her, while Jacob and a couple of his friends decide to save her.
The vamps seem to be less powerful than in the first film. When they play baseball they can run faster than the speed of sound, but here they face a real threat of being chased down by big CGI doggies.
There is an after-credits sequence involving the Volturi. They want the half-vamp child, which nicely sets up the next film. Yes, this entire movie is just a SETUP - nothing of interest actually happens. Except Jacob's reaction when he first sees Bella's child ... but that is just plain creepy!
Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 2 (2012)
As the final book in the Twilight series, this ties up lots of loose ends.
The Volturi close in on the Cullens, who are harbouring Bella's mutant child Renee Smee.
Even the fact she is also known as Nessie (yes, Jacob nicknamed her after the Lough Ness Monster)
does not help this film get over its first huge flaw, the girl's name!
Irina ( Maggie Grace ) sees the child and thinks she is an abomination, a child-vamp like in Interview With The Vampire . The Volturi must protect the secrecy of vampirism by destroying such abominations. This is their new motivation for seeking a climactic confrontation with the Cullens, so the storyline can be given an action-packed conclusion.
Bella's escape plan is to buy fake IDs, courtesy of Bunk from The Wire.
The Cullens want to make a fight of it. They team up with a lot of renegade vamps, as well as the local werewolves. However, the villainous Volturi have an army twice the size.
The climactic battle has both sides led by centuries-old vampires who commanded armies centuries before you were even born, to quote the famous Frank Langella line from Dracula (1979) . However, these Immortal warriors show no idea of strategy or tactics. The vamps just run at each other as fast as they can, jump and grapple with each other mid-air. That is it. No weapons, no well-choreographed martial arts scenes ...
Despite the lack of choreography in the fight scenes, there is one thing this movie adds to the vampire concept. Several vampires have superpowers! The precog's ability to see the future was established in the first film, to provide foreshadowing and a small amount of tension to the plot. Other superpowers include the ability to manipulate water. One girl is a walking taser, able to zap even the most powerful vamp just by touching them. Bella's power, in keeping with her status as a care-giver and submissive, allows her to shield herself and Edward from any harm. In the end it all boils down to one question. Can a werewolf outrun a vamp? Remember, it is established in the first film that the vamps can run faster than the speed of sound! We also get to see what happens when a telepath reads a precog's mind.
Underworld Franchise
Underworld: Rise of the Lycans (2009)
This is the back-story hinted at in the first film in the series
- the story of how the war between Vampires and Lycans began.
It is a prequel, filmed after the first two,
so it contains lots of familiar faces.
The entire franchise has been built around Kate Beckinsale. This film is set before her character became a Vampire, so the role of ass-kicking Vamp babe is filled by Viktor's daughter Rhona Mitra . She has a forbidden affair with Lucien, an enslaved Lycan. This leads on to a Spartacus style uprising, as the werewolf slaves revolt against their Vampire masters.
Underworld (2003)
Seline (
Kate Beckinsale
) is a Vampire assassin who hunts down werewolves.
The two clans are well-organised, and use hi-tech weaponry!
Corvin (Scott Speedman) is an American tourist. Seline must stop the Werewolves from getting their claws on him.
Meanwhile, a lot of intrigue goes on among the vamps - including Sophia Myles and Seline's sire, Viktor (Bill Nighy - POTC: Dead Man's Chest ).
Underworld: Evolution (2006)
This takes up where the previous film left off.
Seline ( Kate Beckinsale ) and Corvin (Scott Speedman) are on the run in Hungary. The main werewolf and vampire factions were wiped out in the first film, but new antagonists pop up.
Markus (Tony Curran - League of Extraordinary Gentlemen ), the third and final vampire elder, is now a super-powerful hybrid. Corvin's own hybrid powers manifest themselves fully, giving us the opportunity to watch extensive carnage courtesy of well-sculpted CGI monsters.
Derek Jacobi and his SWAT Team do a clean-up job. They have their own agenda, concerning Markus' twin brother - the first ever werewolf!
Underworld: Awakening (2012)
The veil is gone, and humans know that Vamps and Lycans exist.
Within a week they have mass-produced silver bullets and UV weapons,
and start a genocidal purge of bloodsuckers and man-eaters.
Selene ( Kate Beckinsale ) wakes up after a dozen years in cryo-sleep. Evil scientist Stephen Rea ( Interview With the Vampire ) was using her and other prisoners to make a special formula. Sandrine Holt and Wes Bentley ( P2, Hunger Games ) feature as scientists in the villain's lab. Dyson the werewolf cop from Lost Girl pops up too.
Selene teams up with India Eisley , the cliched Creepy little girl from J-Horror flicks. They go in search of other vamps. Yes, somehow the vamps are now the good guys and the Lycans are villains.
There are three separate writing credits on this film, which means that at least fifty percent of the script was rewritten twice. The middle credit is given to J Michael Straczynski himself, the brains behind Babylon 5 , but that is no saving grace. The film is riddled with plot holes and non-sequiturs as a result of its hotch-potch origins. Shocking that for a film about vamps and lycans, the real monster is Frankenstein's screenplay.
Underworld: Blood Wars (2016)
Selene (
Kate Beckinsale
) is back for more.
The previous episode was set in a dystopian USA.
This one is more like
Harry Potter
, with no major characters outside the Vamps and Lycans.
Selene travels to Eastern Europe, where she meets up with her allies Thomas (Charles Dance - Game of Thrones ) and his son David (Theo James - Divergent ). However, an Ancient named Semira ( Lara Pulver ) has arrived at the Eastern coven and has started to play politics in order to take it over. Selene is assigned to work with Semira's henchman Varga (Bradley James - Merlin ) to train vampire soldiers.
The Lycans have a new leader, Marius (Tobias Menzies - Outlander ). He has assembled an army, and they intend to wipe out the vamps. Of course, the Lycans have been reduced to being much weaker than vamps. They are not a credible threat, and when they attack in vast numbers this just puts Selene in a target-rich environment.
The main plot device is Selene's daughter. She is a true hybrid, and her blood will give superpowers to whoever drinks it. However, Selene does not know where her daughter is - for security reasons they split up, and cannot contact each other. Therefore this McGuffin is a bit of a damp squib.
All in all, this is the weakest of the series. Director Len Wiseman is now merely a Producer, and his job has been taken by a newbie. The writing is atrocious, filled with plot-holes and poor characterisation. However, at least the cast is top-notch.
Werewolf Movies
Bloodthirsty (2020)
Grey (
Lauren Beatty
) is a lesbian musician who is troubled by nightmares.
She is a vegetarian as well as a vagetarian,
but her dreams are of her eating raw flesh.
Her Psychiatrist, Dr Swan (Michael Ironside -
Total Recall
), precribes her some anti-pychotic medication.
Grey goes to record her next album in the remote countryside mansion of eccentric producer Vaughn Daniels (Greg Bryk - Bitten ). The presence of this player is the give-away. He is a Canadian actor best known for bit-part villains, and his biggest role was in a werewolf TV show. Therefore the audience must suspect he is a villain or a werewolf - or both.
Cursed (2005)
Christina Ricci
and her brother Jesse Eisenberg (
Kick-Ass, Scott Pilgrim
) are stalked by a werewolf in modern-day Los Angeles.
But out of an all-star cast, who is the lycanthrope?
Christina has love interest Joshua Jackson ( Fringe ), rival Judy Greer and boss Michael Rosenbaum ( Smallville ) to worry about.
Jesse wants to date Kristina Anapau , but has to deal with School bully Milo Ventriglia ( Heroes ).
This was directed by Wes Craven , and needed lots of re-shoots. Unfortunately the result of the re-editing is a disjointed effort.
Monsterwolf (2010)
This is a surprisingly watchable (if unsurprising and predictable) monster movie.
In Louisiana, USA, an oil company is prospecting on Native American land.
The workers awaken an ancient curse,
a massive wolf with supernatural powers.
It then proceeds to eat everyone who works for the oil company, one by one.
Our heroine ( ) is a lady lawyer hired by the villainous CEO (Robert Picardo - The Howling ). He selected her not due to her skill or experience, but because she was raised in the cajun town and her father is the local sheriff. She also has a loser ex-BF (Jason London - Mallrats ) among the locals.
This is one of the best of this genre so far. It seems to have higher production values than most made-for-TV Syfy efforts, and is comparable in some ways with a straight-to-DVD piece instead. Damning by faint praise, perhaps, but there are worse ways to kill a couple of hours.
Moon of the Wolf (1972)
A young woman is discovered dead in a remote part of Louisiana, USA.
The Sheriff (David Janssen -
) leads an investigation.
Red: Werewolf Hunter (2010)
FBI trainee Virginia (
Felicia Day
) brings her co-worker fiance (Kavan Smith -
Stargate: Atlantis
) home to meet her family.
It turns out that they hunt werewolves as a hobby,
and he is now a new recruit into their militia.
The local sheriff is Greg Bryk - formerly a werewolf alpha in Bitten . This is much more entertaining than that show, which was grim and depressing and had no sympathetic characters at all. Now he is one of the militia, who live in the equivalent of Stonehaven. The werewolves are cheesy CGI bipeds instead of being sleek realistic quadrupeds, but the ones in the TV show were used very sparingly because of the expense. This effort, with its straight-to-video budget, could not have afforded better. Also, to cut down on the gore factor the dead werewolves burst into flames and turn to dust when they die.
The hunters are meant to be the good guys. Some wolf-packs are protected by a truce, as long as they keep themselves locked up during the full moon and do not attack humans. However, if a human is freshly bitten they will be killed immediately, rather than be allowed the opportunity to obey the rules of the treaty. This hardly seems fair - especially when Virginia explains that she and her family slaughtered an entire town of freshly converted people.
A new werewolf is in town - Gabriel (Stephen McHattie - Haunter ), a super-Alpha who can control his own transformations and turn into his werewolf form at will. He establishes a new clan of werewolves. To fight them, the hunters have some cool-looking weapons.
A lot of cliches get invoked here. The good guys split up so they can be picked off more easily. One of them is bitten, and thus becomes a potential threat to the others.
Scream Of The Wolf (1974)
In a remote part of Arizona,
a man is killed by a creature that exhibits characteristics of both man and wolf.
The sheriff enlists help from a local hunter (Peter Graves -
Buck Rogers in the 25th Century
).
The problem is that there is only one real suspect in the whole who-dunnit. That said, this trope has never been a problem for the Columbo TV series.
Skinwalkers (2006)
Jason Behr (
Roswell
) leads a biker gang of feral werewolves, including Kim Coates (
Dresden Files
) and
Natassia Malthe
.
Rhona Mitra tries to protect her child from these Wolves on Wheels. Luckily, she has friends of her own, including Sarah Carter . This leads to a shootout at High Noon.
The bar scene from The Accused turns into the bar scene from Near Dark .
Strippers versus Werewolves (2012)
Punter Martin Kemp (
Embrace of the Vampire
) turns hairy and attacks a stripper.
Elsewhere, Gangster Stephen Berkoff ( U.F.O. ) falls foul of a gang of werewolves.
The strippers, led by their Madame ( Sarah Douglas ), find themselves besieged by the werewolf gangsters. There is also a Romeo-and-Juliet subplot, when one of the gangsters turns out to be engaged to one of the strippers.
To further liven things up, there is a cameo by Robert Englund ( Nightmare on Elm Street ).
Track Of The Moon Beast (1976)
This movie has a cast of first-time actors,
most of whom never bothered working on another movie.
The director himself has a few previous crew credits,
but this is his only listed directorial achievement.
Werewolves on Wheels (1971)
This is from the early 1970s,
when gangs of thugs went around riding motorbikes
without any sign of helmets.
A biker gang defile a satanic ceremony,
so the satanists cast a curse upon them.
This film has great cinematography, with lots of wide shots of the desert.
Wolf Man (2025)
The story starts in Oregon in the 1990s.
A young boy lives with his father in a
Cabin in the Woods
. The father does his best,
but he is a bit bossy and old-school for modern audiences.
They go deer-hunting together,
and run into some kind of man-beast.
This sets the tone for the rest of the film.
Thirty years later, the young boy has grown up to become a father himself. His greatest fear starts to come true when he finds himself becoming a bossy parent like his own dad. The good news is that his dad is declared legally dead so Junior can take his wife Charlotte ( Julia Garner ) and daughter to live in the old cabin.
The family get besieged in the cabin. Worse, the man is infected and starts to turn. His senses get heightened, his body slowly and grotesquely morphs like in a David Cronenberg film, and we get some awesome shots from his perspective. However, this is all a metaphor for him becoming a toxically masculine parent - just like his own father. At least it allows Charlotte the wife to become the Final Girl.
This is a Jason Blum production, written and directed by Leigh Whannell . However, it is not a generic horror. Instead it is the Elevated Horror version of a werewolf story. The monster represents the characters' psychological issues, or whatever. Basically the film is a drama, with a bit of external jeopardy shoehorned in.
Wolves (2014)
The protagonist (Lucas Till -
Monster Trucks
) is a teenage boy who narrates the story.
The result is basically MacGuyver (2015) meets
Teen Wolf
.
The protagonist is a champion sports player who begins to develop a werewolf nature. Not when he hit puberty, which would make sense, but when he is in his final year in High School. When he drives out to lovers' lane with Kaitlyn Leeb he loses control of his animal urges.
While on the run he meets up with a fellow drifter, One-Eyed Jack (John Pyper-Ferguson - Alphas ), who directs him to a remote town named Lupine Ridge. There he meets up with his long-lost uncle (Stephen McHattie - Haunter ), who gives him a job as a farm-hand.
Unfortunately the town is ruled by tough-guy Connor (Jason Momoa - Game Of Thrones ). Our hero must battle the villain for dominance.
This may be a relatively low-budget effort, but it is well-cast to say the least. Even the supporting players went on to bigger and better things. The town barmaid may seem like a younger Wynonna Earp , but that is because she is actually the young Melanie Scrofano !
